Short Story - Acid Burns

[Hawki]

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/lor...s/acid-burns/1

"It burns us it burns us!"

Oh wait, wrong media. Um..."hurgh, argh!"

Or whatever sound marines make when they die. Anyway, the roach short story is up.

Edit: So, having now read it, kind of "meh." Not outright bad, but nothing we haven't seen before and perhaps stuff that we have. Maybe it's down to interpretation, but the entire moon base siege felt like an adaptation of the Whisky Outpost siege in Starship Troopers (the movie), from its walls to the zerg/arachnids burrowing under it.

And "First Contact War?" Seriously? This isn't Mass Effect.

Edit 2: But holy shit, the cover artwork is awesome.

[Visions of Khas]

This entire story was one big "meh" to me. =\

[Hawki]

This is probably something others have noticed, but running it by...

Last week's story, Great One, featured Vera Langridge, who's one of the Project Blackstone researchers. This one featured Lee Treicher, who's the head of security. Are the stories entering a new phase, as in, starting to focus on the characters themselves? There's potential certainly in terms of action/conflict - Red's mentioned being under fire by Umojan snipers for instance. These could be coincidences, but of the two stories that feature PB characters only appearing now has got me wondering...

But for how long? With the release of this story, this makes eleven HotS stories. The Leaders of Azeroth series ran for 12, and I find it hard to imagine StarCraft would go longer than that when Warcraft is a larger and more profitable media. And makes me still question what the heck all this is leading up to, because I imagine it would cost quite a bit, especially with outside writers being commissioned.

[Visions of Khas]

Did Leaders of Azeroth lead into anything?

I'm wondering if Project Blackstone is located in Skygeirr Station? The station seemed to be a massive installation carved into a mammoth asteroid. Blackstone may be an isolated cell within the station.

[Hawki]

Except Skygeirr was located on an actual planet, whereas Blackstone has been outright stated to be on an asteroid. And while there's some wriggle room, considering the experiments on protoss, would the Tal'darim really abide by that? Especially since more protoss experiments are still going on in the lower levels, where, if they're the same facility, the Tal'darim already are?

As for Leaders of Azeroth, it didn't really lead into anything per se. Still, WoW is an ongoing thing, profits coming in from subscription fees. So if the powers that be decided to do the series to gather/sustain interest, then I can see the rationale in a business sense. LoA works for WoW in the ongoing sense, and the Pandaria-based short stories work in the sense of the here and now. But HotS has been released and it's a one-time purchase. Releasing the stories prior or just after HotS's release would make sense, but would they really still promote HotS this way so long after release?

[Telenil]

I liked that we got officers who actually adapt their tactics to what they see. Using grenades against burrowing roaches is the sort of things real soldiers would do. I also liked that the defenses were still standing when the ship arrived, it's more believable that way.